Development of A Blended Learning Support For An Introductory Calculus Course at a Distance Learning Institution

Introductory Calculus is a basic and compulsory course for the new students of Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Data of students’ grades in the fall semester of 2013 showed that from 263 students who took the course exam, about 56 got grade E, which is categorized as fail, and 97 got grade D, which is categorized as borderline to fail. The big numbers of students who got E or D in the course was attributed to the less skill of the students in self-regulated learning especially in introductory calculus. Many of the students were fresh graduate of high school that do not have the skills to survive in the distance education system yet. The Mathematics department plan to develop a blended learning support program to develop student skills in learning the course and to survive the distance education system. The course already provides online tutorial which is not compulsory. It is planned to add the component of video conference to the online tutorial, to help the students feel as if they learn in a face-to-face classroom situation whereby they can meet with a teacher that can help them figuring out the solution to the difficulties they experience. The video conference is supposed to help the students to do in depth learning and develop skills necessary for the course. The video conference will be conducted four times to accompany the 8 times of online tutorials. The support program is within 8 weeks. This article will describe the planning and development of the blended learning support program based on the A (analysis) D (design) D (development) I (implementation) E (evaluation) model of instructional program development. It is hoped that the development can result in a model of student learning support for college mathematics in a distance learning systems